Songline in the key of E flat minor

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

I am a chocoholic. I only recognize chocolate as a proper dessert or sweet treat, outside of a few exceptions. I will scoff at bananas foster, cherries jubilee or apple pie. However, one fantastic exception is a shortbread biscuit: a solid yet flaky cookie that's heavy for its size and tastes buttery with a hint of sugar. I can't control myself when they are around.

Can you hear the bagpipes?

Today is my father's birthday. And one of the many traits that I share with him is this love of shortbread. Since I'm traveling from Glasgow to Oban (in the above mentioned Highlands) today, I baked some shortbread fingers with love and sent them home last week via my mother so that the delicate slightly-sweet treats will be there for my dad in the morning. All the while, I've been picking up different brands of commercial shortbread.

Detail of the opened package - it didn't stand a chance

Shortbread is simple to make; traditionally it's made from three ingredients: sugar, butter and flour. The , and gets its names from its texture (from an old meaning of the word short, according to Wikipedia). The high butter content inhibits the formation of any long gluten strands and this is what gives the biscuits their divine flaky texture. Though, it's a few scant ingredients and not a lot of skill to bake, I do feel that making it right is a labor of love.

My homemade shortbread fingers looking good enough to eat

After overdosing on shortbread and Jaffa cakes on my 2012 trip to Scotland and Wales, I googled “shortbread recipe like Marks and Spencer” to find a good start in order to recreate at home the biscuits that I hoard in the UK. (Also, shortbread bikkies are simpler to make then Jaffa cakes.) After a few trials, I have fine-tuned a recipe into something that it very close to the almost-powdery, slightly-grainy, butter-rich and sugar-kissed cookies that are Scotland’s pride and joy and that I (and my dad) adore.

Monday, March 04, 2013

As I prepare for my 40th birthday holiday through the British Isles, I remember that I never posted this entry about my September vacation.

I microblogged my trip through Europe using twitter and foursquare, even creating my own hashtag for the vacation, #CJintheUK, and tweeted happily along (usually when I could find abundant free wifi.) I think that it makes an amusing travelog to follow - complete with foursquare check ins, twitter conversations and selected uploaded pictures. (I am including the time and date stamp which came from the backlog in HootSuite, which is presented in Eastern Time.)

I didn't really edit the tweets, except for an occasional misspelling which I caught, a foreign word needing to be italicized or if a tweet needed a little clarification. I left in the hash tags, probably to the chagrin of some of you, though I thought that it could be interesting to see what topics or words I was tagging in order to make my tweets searchable. For those of you who don't know why tweeters employ hash tags, a hash tag is a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you search on #beer, you'll get a list of tweets related to the beer that tweeters have marked.

All throughout my time in Wales, I was making referencing to the British show, "Gavin & Stacey," which unfortunately my parents have not heard of and they may have grown a bit weary of my quips, especially seen in one of my later tweets.

After my trip to the British Isles, I realised how much I appreciate those countries: the history, my ancestral connection, the people I met and how my interactions with them made my holiday different than just touring around with a group. I was longing for it. I started listening to "Soul Cages" to transition being back home and I would seek out British pop stars on the jukebox when I went out. Other songs just struck a chord about the trip and I tweeted some of the lyrics that resonated with me. Finally, I would just reach out to the twittersphere to make a connection back to that great British experience. These following tweets are corollaries to my vacation; I've added them for fun.

Bring down the angels
Cast them from my sight
I never want to see
A million suns at midnight(IrishWombat Sep 22, 6:32pm via HootSuite)

pre-games with the peaty Connemara #whiskey by Cooley - an Irish whiskey with a hint of a good Scotch. 4sq.com/PVbi1p(IrishWombat Sep 22, 9:14pm via foursquare)

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

For bookclub this last weekend, I had picked 44 Scotland Streetby Alexander McCall Smith since I had thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Edinburgh as well as Scotlandand wanted to read something based in that area. You may know him for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series which was made into an HBO show.

I obviously chose Scottish and English food for the theme. I knew that I was going to make my shortbread fingers as well as serve some ginger and whisky malt preserves that I had picked up in Marks & Spencer over some good soft cheese. But I needed an entrée.
I searched for ideas and but only found haggis as the quintessential Scotch food.

First, I wasn’t confident that I would even find any haggis if I looked for it and it is a rather maligned food (though I found it evocative of Philadelphia’s scrapple.) I dug deeper and focused on googling "Scottish/Scotch entrée" and found Fife Miners’ Stew. Since Fife, the council area, is across the Forth from Edinburgh, I felt that I struck culinary gold with this beef stew and it would a good fit for dinner.

It was a success, bookclub ate it up. (Yes, the pun was intended.) Even Brian, who never thought that he has a parsnip before, thought that the stew was delicious. The house smelled so good after cooking the dish. I enjoyed it so much - and it is the perfect cold winter day food - that I needed to make it again and soon. This time, however, I thought that I should adapt it for the slow cooker.

For bookclub, I cooked the stew following the UKTV recipe listing to a tee. However for today’s stew, I took the suggestion of adding sherry since the stew is reminiscent Bookbinder’s Snapper Soup and used an entire can of tomato purée.

Directions:
1. Sauté the onion and garlic in butter until the onions are soft and translucent; place in the slow cooker.
2. Shake the beef cubes in seasoned flour until well covered; add the beef and flour into the slow cooker, followed by the vegetables, orange peel, salt and pepper.
3. Stir the purée into the stock to dissolve it; add the wine and stock to the slow cooker.
4. Cook on Low for 8 hours.
5. Stir in the sherry before serving.

Sunday, January 06, 2013

It’s January again and it looks like we all survived the
Mayan Prophesy. So I figured that I
would work on my resolutions for the upcoming year.I have a mediocre track record with my
resolutions, but it doesn’t stop me from making them every year.While I will build upon some of the ones that
I have made before – ranging from the inane (wearing sunglasses as often as
possible) to the meaningful (going to the gym regularly), I’m adding one more
to the list: writing a page a day.

I always wanted to be an author and have a book published that
people want to read, but I haven’t really put “pen to paper” and written that
book, yet.So the goal of this
resolution is to ask myself daily to type out a page. Hopefully it will be a
page about the story I want to write into a novel, but if not, as long as it’s
an exercise in getting myself to write habitually and daily, I will consider that a success.

I simply open Microsoft Word to start a new document and I
type out my words, my thoughts, my story or my tale onto the page until I hit a page break. For me this page averages
somewhere between 500 and 800 words, depending on the density of my paragraphs,
my use of dialogue or the inclusion of quotes. I don’t have to stop when I get to the page
break, I can continue on if I have the thoughts and the energy, especially when
my story carries me along. Yet, I can’t stop my writing for the day until I get
to that page break.I can take recesses
or work on the page in the middle of other tasks, but I can’t end my day
without typing those 500 to 800 words.

It gives me freedom and structure. Maybe I can’t write about
my story one day, so I can take a break and write about anything else.However there are two caveats, I can’t use a
blog entry to stand in for my exercise and I can’t rework something and have it
take credit for writing my daily page.

As of this post, I haven’t worked on my sixth day’s entry,
but I have written over five pages for my novel and one page for future
use.I’m embracing creativity by working
it out each day.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Over last weekend, I rented a car at a location at 30th Street Station. The rental car facilities' cars are now located in a parking lot next to the Cira Centre instead of the basement of Amtrak's 30th Street Station. It walking my paperwork back, I realized that I had never been so close to the Cira Centre before and snapped this picture. I like how the perspective distorts that non-perpendicular lines of the building, causing you not to notice it at first.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

I fell in love with Scotland. It's like Ireland but connected to England, and I must confess - I love the Scottish accent more. Here's a rather nostalgic shot taken in the Moffat Hills of Southern Uplands of Scotland.

The grass really was that green and the sky that blue. It's moments like this I can start to wrap my mind around how the Celtic languages had same word to mean green or blue, glas, because they are both so magnificent together.